I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

One of the more delightful parts about living in a big city is seeing people reading while they walk. I find this intriguing partially because my siblings and I used to do this in our house, much to my father's confusion. But really, as adults, aren't we overflowing with things to think about that can occupy our minds as we walk? Is it a remarkably good book that forces people to resort to reading even when walking or is it an over-achieving sense of need for accomplishment at every moment? If it is the latter, why haven't they turned to books-on-ipod?

Komar and Melamid

Two Russian immigrants, Komar and Melamid, conducted a poll in 1995 to determine aspects of the most and least wanted art, which they then created for 13 different countries. On the top, we the least desired painting for the United States; below that, we see the ideal American painting, according to their survey. The idea of conducting a survey about art makes sense, given the tendency of artists toward kitsch and arts becoming closely intertwined with and responsive to the market.

Another Reason to Brush

"Teeth are of the utmost importance, they are a bodyguard, hiding behind the lips’ seductive softness." -Soren Kierkegaard

I found this amusing, and also telling. The problem with the aesthete is that he conceives of all things as relating to his pleasure. Here, the pretty girl's teeth are considered only insofar as they are a barrier to his enjoyment, and not, as in Solomon's view (as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing) as beautiful in themselves and because they belong to her.

Think of the Long Trip Home.

Questions of Travel


There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

--Never to have studied history in

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"


Elizabeth Bishop

The question of travel is a very interesting one to raise in relation to communitarians, particularly. I was at a conference, lately, on Wendell Berry's thought that all of the attendees traveled, often long distances, to attend (even despite the future of travel given peak oil, etc., one must ask one's self about the consistency of it in relation to professed localism). For instance, if you can easily get intellectual stimuation outside of your community, then how real is your commitment to the community really? The last two lines of Bishop's poem point out that the question of travel can't even be properly asked these days, given that we don't have an accurate understanding of home. Bishop asks us to realize that home and travel must be held in tension and that having one completely and well implies a loss of the benefits of the other.

I find it very interesting that "The mass is ended; go in peace" actually means, "There is one more song. Sing it all the way to the end or else."

As I can't find a photograph of my favorite icon--one I came across in the oldest remaining church in Romania--I will describe it:

It portrays Christ with a vine growing out of the wound in His side. On the vine are growing grapes that Christ squeezes in His hand, allowing the juice to flow into the chalice.

This struck me as particularly beautiful in conveying the unity between Christ and His body, the Church--there is such a oneness that the suffering of Christians is tied up in Christ's Eucharistic sacrifice.

Ooohh! New Bible Verses!

A faithful friend is the elixir of life,
and those who fear the Lord will find one.
Whoever fears the Lord makes true friends,
for as a man is, so is his friend.
(Ecclesiasticus)

Skee-Lo - I Wish

I always wanted to be 6 feet tall (because of basketball), but, alas, I stopped growing at 5'7" and 3/4.

On Passion and Virtue

While The Taming of the Shrew frustrates my pseudo-feminist sensibilities at times (for instance, when the men were sitting in a room taking bets on whose wife would come when fetched), I think that a significant point that one could take away is the relationship between eros and virtue. Petruchio offered a form of grace to Kate--it was a love coming from an other that called her and caused her to change and become more virtuous (at least in a very male conception of virtue, but I think a conception of virtue that also wouldn't be inconsistent with a complementarian understanding of the relationship between the sexes).

Questions of Honour

According to a famous anecdote, Robert E. Lee, as the president of Washington College, responded to a young man asking for a copy of the rules: "We have but one rule, and it is that every student must be a gentleman." From this grew the concept of an honour system, based on the expectation of gentlemanly behaviour, by which the students are governed at my college.

Honour, by this understanding, is socially defined and constructed by the group; the honour system is entered into contractually when one signs a card saying “as a member of this community I will be expected to abide by its honour system.”

I’ve heard the argument (and was momentarily persuaded) that the reason our sexual assault statistics are way over the national average is because rape is not prosecuted as an honour violation. Were rape considered an HV, they reason, it would almost disappear on our campus as have cheating and stealing.

The problem here is not so much with honour as it is with its supremacy; we have lost the idea of a transcendent morality underlying and supporting this system and believe that only a socially constructed system of honour defines right and wrong.

Yes, it’s admirable that we are maintaining virtues that might otherwise die away, but are we sacrificing adherence to a much deeper code of morality? Is something wrong only because it is unbecoming of our conception of a gentleman? Have we forgotten that natural laws still govern our behaviour, and that there is a reason that murder and rape are not matters of honour?

In our attempt to be gentlemen, are we forgetting that we first must be men?

Fabulous Things I Heard on the Radio

"Now that the leaves are changing, it may be time to change careers."

I Sing the Body Electric

Since I was quite young, I've hated Walt Whitman. I think I have at least marginally better reasons than I did when I was young (when I could only prudishly object to the sensuality of his poems). There is a sense to Whitman that he sees himself as embodying the whole tradition and all of humanity that proceeds him, and yet not embodying and passing it down in its particularity, but rather in its lowest common denominator--the body. Okay, I admit, there is more than Whitman than this--bodies, in their flourishing, are passionate, active, strong bodies. Consider this poem:

As Adam, Early In The Morning

AS Adam, early in the morning,

Walking forth from the bower, refresh'd with sleep;

Behold me where I pass--hear my voice--approach,

Touch me--touch the palm of your hand to my

Body as I pass;

Be not afraid of my Body.

What does he do? He sets himself within the tradition of humanity that started with Adam. There is a sense in which he puts himself back in the Garden--back at a time of innocence. And then he asks for a unification of all of humanity in a way that hearkens back to the way in which people might have responded to Christ when He walked among them, touching Him as He passed. Ending his poem with the word, "Body," brings to mind Christ emphasis on His own body in the Eucharist and also Whitman's own focus on the body. Christ and Whitman go about this in two very different ways, however. While Whitman's invocation of body is done in such a way that it masks differences among people and appeals to an amorphous understanding of humanity, Christ's concern with the body and with the physical world shows that redemption comes only through and to particular persons, who do not lose their particularity by seeking union with the divine.

This is strikingly in accord with Tocqueville's assertion in Democracy in America that in the democratic age, the sources of inspiration for poetry will no longer be in particular men, but rather will be in "passions and ideas." Furthermore, poets will not "traverse earth and sky to find a wondrous object full of contrasts of infinite greatness and littleness," but rather "contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God."

The Land under the Mountain

"The Bush administration and top American generals have been vocal in warning that passage of the resolution could cause great harm to the American war effort in Iraq and have put significant pressure on Republicans to abandon their support for the measure."

It seems to me that Bush et al. have a difficult job--they are arguing that the timing of this resolution is wrong. That implies that the substance of the resolution itself is at least not absurd. I don't understand why the fact that Turkey is our ally in the "war on terror" prevents us from asserting particular historical facts. Do we ignore the shortcomings of nations that are our "friends"? It seems to me that we ought to attend even more to the failings of countries with which we are allied.

Additionally, contra Representative Murtha

(“This happened a long time ago and I don’t know whether it was a massacre or a genocide, that is beside the point,” said Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is urging Ms. Pelosi to keep the resolution from the floor. “The point is, we have to deal with today’s world.”),

I believe that when politics is restrained to a conversation regarding the future and ignoring the past, then one cannot see the present correctly, nor make correct decisions regarding the future. In Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt writes about this problem:

"Authority, resting on a foundation in the past as its unshaken cornerstone, gave the world the permanence and durability which human bings need ... . Its loss is tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world, which indeed since then has begun to shift, to change and tranform itself with ever-increasing rapidity from one shape into another ... . But the loss of worldly permanence and reliability--which politically is identical with the loss of authority--does not entail, at least not necessarily, the loss of the human capacity for bulding, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live for those who come after us."

The question is, then, whether our President and legislators understand Turkey to be a nation that recently killed many of its own and neighboring people and denies it still. I'm not sure that our close relationship with them reflects that fact.

Really, recognizing the Armenian genocide is not simply a non-binding, meaningless Congressional resolution; there is the possibility, at least, that this could be the start of more significant reparations to the Armenian people.

On Bullshit

Swearing intrigues me because I can't quite figure out whether it is bad or whether it is just words. The New Republic has an interesting article. To quote:

[This leads to] another mystery about swearing: the bizarre number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, "You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure." There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other uses.

And the conclusion:

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

Maybe swearing intrigues me because its very use implies the existence of the divine and morals (Eliot, in After Strange Gods, laments a culture in which blasphemy is not even possible, because there is no divine left to blaspheme). Perhaps I am fascinated because swearing is an expression of passionate extremes in highs and lows, which are discouraged by a culture that would like to make our expressions exactly even, cutting off high highs and low lows and making everything a boring grey mediocrity of expression. Or maybe I simultaneously enjoy the fact that society respects certain customs and enjoy my own prerogative to break those customs.

On-Line Adoration--Ushering in a New Era of Eucharistic Adoration

Uh-oh!

Granted, the website acknowledges that "Jesus is not necessarily physically present with you when visiting the Blessed Sacrament on-line." Nonetheless, I think this is a problematic devotion. So technology obviously creates many new dilemmas: for instance, what about watching mass on television? But as a previously Pentecostal, this idea of adoration online is particularly irksome to me. One thing that Pentecostals emphasize (rightly, I think) is the omnipresence of God--God is everywhere and we can know His presence. We can pray to Him wherever we are and worship Him, for instance, when walking down the beach. Granted, there is a lack of recognition in Pentecostalism of the unique presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

But we don't need the Eucharist there to focus ourselves on Christ. In fact, it might be inappropriate for the Eucharist to be present to us at every moment. For instance, the website advertises itself as useful to "business people who want the sacred to permeate their work day." But the point of an exposition of the Eucharist is not just to be there as we go about our lives, but rather so that we would adore Christ. We adore Him in one way through our work and in another way through prayer and meditation and worship. And while His real presence is appropriate to the latter, I'm not sure it is to the former. And believing that we can only pray in the presence of the Eucharist is false--we also can and must pray as we go about our daily lives.

The Problems of Running

This is all a bit hypocritical because I thought of these reasons in my head today as I was out for a run.

So, the problems of running:

First, walking is infinitely more civilized. Walking is enjoyable, calm, and restores ones soul. Walking rightly understood involves beautiful countryside, or at least beautiful houses. Walking ought to involve conversation (if no people are present, God will do). It is a high-order leisurely activity. Running, on the other hand is uncivilized and inhumane.

Running, these days, often doesn't have a reason. If one is training for a race, it is just a made-up reason. There is little emphasis on competition or winning; rather, we focus on bettering our own time or, worse yet, on "just finishing." I can understand running to beat other people, but that isn't why most people run.

Furthermore, running is hard on our bodies. I'm not sure if that's true at all, but I think it's hard on one's knees and can also lead to varicose veins. Walking, on the other hand, is easy on our bodies.

Even worse than running, I think, is the gym (okay, hypocritical here, too...). I'm quite certain that in twenty plus years there will be diagnosed disorders of people who have spent inordinate amounts of time on elliptical machines in front of televisions. Probably eventually gyms will be made to look like the outdoors, with pictures of mountains and hills and lakes on the televisions.

On Dependence

Alasdair MacIntyre writes in Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues about dolphins and dependence. On the topic of our interactions with those who are dependent, such as those with extreme forms of disability and those who are very young or very old, he writes,

"How could they be our teachers? ... What they give us is the possibility of learning something essential, what it is for someone else to be wholly entrusted to our care, so that we are answerable for their well-being."

He goes on to point out that there are two aspects to this caring: first, the physical care, and, secondly, acting as a proxy, or as a voice for those who are unable to speak. In addition, then, to the evil of not treating a person in accord with his dignity, there is an additional evil for a society in losing the ability to speak for the disabled and dependent properly because it is not actively caring for them.

Per Ilana's Request

I finally accomplished my life-long dream (okay, I've only had this dream since I read Misty of Chincoteague) of seeing the wild ponies on Assateague Island. The wild ponies were, interestingly, surrounded by tourists taking pictures and sometimes feeding them. The Island as a whole was delightful.

On the Office

I want to claim the office as a uniquely Pennsylvanian show. Besides from the fact that it is delightful, I think that the similarity also lies in self-deprecating attitude--it seems to me that Pennsylvanians have nothing to warrant pretension and are well aware of that. We call central Pennsylvania "Pensyl-tucky," for instance. Moreover, we realize that our lives are simple and calm, but we enjoy the drama that we make up to make life more fun (although perhaps this latter point is more of a reflection on me than on Pennsylvania proper).

Armenia.2

Beautiful line:

It’s a helluva thing when a war on terror supposedly requires the U.S.
Congress to pretend that genocide didn’t occur.


This brings to mind the scene in Atom Egoyan's very fine film Ararat, which is about (among other things) the filming of a movie about the Armenian genocide. In it, an actor, who plays the part of a Turkish soldier, asks the director if he was chosen for the part because he was Turkish. The actor goes on to defend the Turks and argue against that the Armenian genocide never occurred. It is a striking moment, because, even in the midst of remembering, it shows that there are those who still deny that it ever happened, including the perpetrators. The fact that the actor, who is, quite clearly, the "bad guy," is taken in by his character and begins to defend his evil-ness, is poignant.

On Memory and Truth

Goodness gracious: America is finally beginning to publicly acknowledge (with a Congressional Resolution) the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917 as a genocide, and President Bush is giving Congress grief, afraid that its action will threaten the relationship between the United States and Turkey. I know, I know, politics is nuanced and requires prudential decisions, and there are gobs and gobs of relevant factors that must be accounted for. But it seems to me that this issue is fundamental--for a national to ignore the truth of its history and refuse to own up to and apologize for its mistakes is intolerable. Memory is an important aspect of the identity and legitimacy of a nation-state, and we shouldn't sit by calmly and allow one of our allies to make up stories about human rights issues. As a communitarian, I want to challenge the thought that we are not responsible for the actions of our ancestors (for instance, although I'm not a big fan of affirmative action, at the same time I don't agree with the argument that we shouldn't have to pay reparations since we never had slaves and the people getting the money were never slaves).


Also, disappointingly, it seems that, somehow, American new sources aren't at all interested in this story, while it is given a place of prominence in international new sources. Also, look at me, interested in politics!

Agrarian Fashion

Last week, when I was walking down the hall at school, one of my professors teased me, asking what sort of agrarian would wear flip-flops as I was. Which led me to the question of agrarian footwear (work boots? bare feet?), which, in turn, made me excited when I came across these Zac Posen spring designs, inspired by, among other things, the "wheat fields of the Great Plains."

From top left, cumulus gown/nimbus dress/cyclone gown; serene gown; red star dress (oh my word! have you ever seen anything this beautiful?); bow dress with crystal wheat brooch; black wheat skirt; wheat sheath dress.

Rows of gravestones, white and neat and even,
Perfectly rounded shape and just-so spaced.
Trees and accompanying inconve
Nient roots should interrupt them frequently.
(But never wire-filled fake flower bunches,
Mourning and ignoring death and change.)
We do what we are good at--carving stone
And choosing words.


Graves of Jesuits and soldiers, uniform,
But typically let's vary shape and size
And age--some should be sinking down and smooth
Reminding us that even memory,
Like my great-grandma's (Mamo), falls apart.
In a reawakening of the past
She calls me by my mother's name.

EDEN is that old-fashioned House

We dwell in every day,

Without suspecting our abode

Until we drive away.

How fair, on looking back, the Day

We sauntered from the door,

Unconscious our returning

Discover it no more.

Things You Learn at a Bridal Shower

Evidently (how do I say this politely?), the timing in which a couple comes together influences whether a baby, if conceived, will be a boy or a girl. I'm intrigued: while I grant that this is most likely an urban legend, if it's true, is it ethical to try for a particular gender? I'm inclined to think no. (This somehow reminds me of fishing as a child at the carnival in a fake stream for yellow ducks with numbers on the bottom. It also sort of reminds me of Jacob and the speckled and spotted cattle whose birth he biologically engineered.)

That's right: I have one of these now...

Friday Afternoons

I went to see a Hopper and a Turner exhibit today per the recommendation of my professor. At the Hopper exhibit, I looked for what the professor suggested--themes of absorption and Annunciation, but was actually more struck by the houses that he painted, particularly by the ones he painted from the back. There is that sense of absorption that he captures with the figures in many of his paintings, but it is even more interesting because he manages to get at it with the house, its back turned toward the viewer. Also, there's just something about rural New England homes.

What struck me most about the Turners was the way that he handled the weather. Additionally, he was clearly flirting with the sublime in the way that explains his affinity for the overlap between poetry and painting.

Once Again, the Wisdom of the New York Times or I Don't Even Know What "Cannulae" Means

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.


“The message is that, after having children, women’s bodies change for the worse,” said Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, a nonprofit group in Washington. If marketing could turn the postpregnancy body “into a socially unacceptable thing, think of how big your audience would be and how many surgeries you could sell them,” she said.

Oh the joys of our technology-driven consumer culture. I have just succeeded in convincing my father that white hair isn't something to be dyed away, but something to be delighted in as an indication of wisdom. And braces, let's all have identical teeth...

On the Lost Art of Blessing and the Superiority of Non-American Birthday Greetings (with the notable exception of my friends who read this blog)

May God bless you each day, may you have peace and joy in your heart and may a man worthy of you find you and may you live happily with him ever after

May all your steps be wise, all your days blessed and all of your deep dreams fulfilled! You are a very special person! Amazing how is wisdom and beauty connected in you, please do keep it.

I want to wish you happy birthday that our Lord might bless you with all his grace and gives you joy, peace, smile, love and handsome man o))))))

happy birthday to you! I hope this finds you and your dear ones well. And I hope you still have your passion for poetry and lust for life

Madame! HAPPY BIRTHDAY to you!!! Wish you happiness, joy and health for many, many years....Hope your birthday party will be great!

Labyrinths

Goodness gracious, I think that nailing the Catholics down on the precise nature of the magisterium is harder than finding out the Masons' secrets. Isn't there a book on the secrets of the Mason's out somewhere? It seems like the Catholic mind on the magisterium is to be as vague and non-committal as possible.

Hear Eliot read The Waste Land here--"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

Also, I think it is Eliotian to be frustrated with the inappropriate intimacy fostered by technology (in particular, facebook) and to whine about people who presume a higher level of intimacy than that which actually exists between you.

A Very Long Engagement

I accidentally (this time, a happy accident) watched this movie for the second time; I think I can't remember that I've seen it because the title (which promises to be a dramatic romance) is so remotely connected to the actual war and detective novel-ness of the movie.

The most interesting part of the film were the themes of hope and despair. The very fact of the men shooting off their hands was a form of despair (as was one of the men asking his wife to be impregnated by his best friend in order to get him out of the military). The women, however, did not despair, although they were sometimes close (for Mathilde, the thin thread of hope could also become her noose). Another woman, the whore who revenges the death of her man, learns too late that revenge is counterproductive. Frankly, it seems that hope itself is very close to despair--it relies so much upon trusting in something that it is not possible to know. The unfailingness of hope is evident in the last scene of the film when Mathilde finds her fiancee. Although he has lost his memory, we know that he is still the same person, and she just sits, happily, looking at him.

I also completely identified with Mathilde's habit of making up conditions, which, if met (although they depend almost entirely upon chance), guarantee a particular outcome.

The Best Birthday Poem

...Though somewhat irrelevant...

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.



Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves, and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves, and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

Berry.4

The end of his poem, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," in which he insists that we not always act predictably and rationally, Berry writes,

So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.


Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?


Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.


As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.


Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Berry has us look to women who value childbearing as the model of what is to be valued (Berry's point overlaps interestingly with Rousseau's assertion that we should educate women to desire well because the way that women desire, men will act). Life, then, for Berry, is oriented toward fecundity and future birth (at another point in the poem, Berry suggests that the reader plant Sequoias). Hope is essential to this project of looking toward the future in anticipation of what you might bear and create in it.